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POSTED IN 01/10
Kikkan Randall
Contributing Editor
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Whether we outwardly admit it or not, we all have dreams.
Some of those dreams include winning Olympic medals, while others may be about the simple act of gliding across the snow on a beautiful winter day.
Dreams are what inspire us to get involved in a new sport or activity in the first place, and dreams give us purpose for committing our energy wholeheartedly to some pursuit that drives us.
I once heard a quote that said, “goals are just dreams with a time limit.”
We have lots of dreams that float around in our heads, but it’s those dreams that we pull out and decide to chase after that become our goals.
Making a dream into a goal is not easy.
Sometimes dreams seem a little too lofty to actually achieve. You find yourself thinking, “it would be nice, but what are the chances?”
If you can take that first step, and find the courage and determination to believe in your ability to succeed, then you are on your way to making that dream come true.
Once you have your big goal picked out, write it down!
Make your goal official by actually putting it into words and posting it somewhere where you will come across it regularly.
I find that once I write my goal down on paper, I’m committed to making it happen. If you only whisper the goal to yourself in your head, it’s easy to manipulate it or forget it all together. Write it down and make it real!
The next step is coming up with a list of smaller goals that will help you get there.
Since the main goal is usually something big, it helps to break it into smaller chunks that seem more manageable.
When I started cross-country ski racing in high school, and was first introduced to World Cup racing, a dream started to formulate about winning one some day.
At first it was just a dream. But as my ski career progressed, that dream became a goal.
In my first World Cup race, I finished near the back of the pack, well off the winning pace.
If I had just focused on making up that huge gap, it would have seemed impossible.
So instead, I worked with my coaches to lay out a list of smaller benchmarks that I needed to achieve, to work my way up to a World Cup victory.
Even the benchmarks and smaller goals can be sizeable and spread out, so it’s important to take another step and break down the goals even further.
Daily goals help me stay focused and give me small challenges to conquer one at a time. Sometimes my daily goals focus on specific ski related tasks, like improving a certain technique by doing drills.
Other times my daily goals center more around my lifestyle choices that determine how much time and energy I can devote to skiing.
Every little success builds on itself, and fuels your confidence. The small failures are good too, if you take the time to learn from them.
When you work on achieving your goal one day at a time, it makes it easier and you stay motivated.
Along the way you also need to have frivolous and fun goals as well.
During training sessions I sometimes pretend that my World Cup competitors are right on my heels and I’ll race them to an imaginary finish line.
I also like to see how long I can balance while gliding on one ski.
These fun little challenges aren’t focused specifically on my goal per se, but they help make my big goal tangible and keep the process fun.
Remember when I told you to write down your big goal? Now is the time to go back and take a look at it.
While we have our sweet list of intricate smaller goals and daily tasks, it is still important to remind ourselves every once and a while of the bigger picture.
I had my goal of winning a World Cup written on my air freshener in my car.
Every time I got in the car to go somewhere, I was reminded to make good decisions and to work hard, so that some day soon I could realize my dream of standing atop the podium.
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